Angelus News | September 22, 2023, Vol. 8, Issue No. 19

DESIRE LINES
HEATHER KING
Heather King is an award-winning
author, speaker, and workshop leader.
The God of the impossible
A monstrance containing the Blessed
Sacrament is displayed on the altar during
a Holy Hour at St. Patrick’s Cathedral
in New York City July 13. | OSV NEWS/
GREGORY A. SHEMITZ
all are repressed. Faith alone triumphs
and faith is hard, dark, stark.”
In a chapter called “The God of the
Impossible,” he writes of a time later
in his stay, again sitting in adoration
one blazing hot morning. He’d been
injured while working alongside the
local laborers.
toward “wellness”: mental and spiritual
health; excellence. Those who sit in
adoration, by contrast, wouldn’t dream
of trying to market what they do. No
one is trying to perfect or pass on a
technique, or hold themselves out
as experts, or offer a certain kind of
experience.
Anyone who regularly sits before
the monstrance in silence knows that
prayer arises from total poverty. That to
pray is to be overshadowed by mystery.
That prayer, grounded in Christ, is
grace.
Nowhere is the scandal of the cross
more apparent than in adoration. No
election is won. No wounds are bandaged.
No garden is tended, no child is
comforted, no prisoner is visited.
“It is love that gives things their
value. It makes sense of the difficulty
of spending hours and hours on one’s
knees praying while so many men need
looking after in the world, and in the
context of love we must view our inability
to change the world, to wipe out evil
and suffering…
It is love which must determine man’s
actions, love which must give unity to
what is divided.
Love is the synthesis of contemplation
and action, the meeting point between
heaven and earth, between God and
man.”
With a gentle rain falling outside,
I began to catch my breath from the
long journey. A hundred dilemmas
passed through my mind. Was I a
“pilgrim,” as I liked to tell myself, or
an unstable crank? Why, after so much
prayer, was I still so judgmental, petty,
and envious? What would become of
me if I started to lose my memory?
I thanked Our Lord, over and over. I
asked him to shore me up, one day at a
time. And then I fell asleep.
I’ve been for several weeks in Ireland’s
County Galway, “enjoying”
some of the worst summer weather
in living memory. When even the
Irish acknowledge the gloom, you
know you’re in trouble.
One bright spot has been the Church
of the Immaculate Conception, a
huge stone structure with ornamental
battlements that towers over the village
of Oughterard.
Adoration is held after 10 a.m. Mass
Tuesdays and Fridays. That first Tuesday,
Father Michael guided us into the
Lamb of God Chapel, led the Divine
Praises, and dimmed the lights.
I looked around at the seven or eight
other oldish women — there were
no men that day — and thought of
the plodding, steady devotion of the
women who come to church all over
the world, day in, day out, week in,
week out; who attend daily Mass, say
the rosary, pray the novenas, grip the
holy cards, wear the scapulars. Who
carry the flame. Who wait. And who in
a very real way have kept the Church
going.
I thought of Carlo Carretto (1910-
1988), an Italian priest who burned his
address book and set out for the Sahara
to follow in the steps of St. Charles de
Foucauld. Murdered by the Tuareg
he’d longed to convert, Foucauld had
been found dead in the sand, inches
away from the monstrance.
Carretto wrote a book about his time
in the Sahara: “Letters from the Desert”
(Orbis Press, $18). I’d gone back to
it many times, and found a copy in the
house where I was staying.
He describes a whole week he spent
alone with the Eucharist, exposed day
and night.
“Silence in the desert, silence in the
cave, silence in the Eucharist. No prayer
is so difficult as the adoration of the
Eucharist. One’s whole natural strength
rebels against it.
One would prefer to carry stones in the
sun. The senses, memory, imagination,
“My leg was hurting terribly, and I had
to work up the force to stop my mind
from wandering. I remembered Pius XII
once asking in one of his audiences,
‘What does Jesus do in the Eucharist?’
and he awaited the reply from his students.
Even today, after so many years, I
do not know how to reply.
What does Jesus do in the Eucharist? I
have thought about it often.
In the Eucharist Jesus is immobilized
not in one leg only, but both, and in his
hands as well. He is reduced to a little
piece of white bread. The world needs
him so much and yet he doesn’t speak.
Men need him so much and he doesn’t
move!
The Eucharist is the silence of God,
the weakness of God.”
How grateful I was to be there,
surrounded by fellow members of the
Mystical Body. The YouTube influence/meditation
gurus had nothing
on these outwardly perfectly ordinary
women who sat in total silence, barely
moving a muscle.
Meditation in secular culture tends
30 • ANGELUS • September 22, 2023 September 22, 2023 • ANGELUS • 31